DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE MEANS THE U.S. ACCEPTS THE RULE OF LAW REGARDING WARFARE

John Fabian Witt has an article today in The Washington Post on how the Declaration of Independence took a novel approach to war - warfare should be subject to the rule of law. Witt, a professor of law and history at Columbia University writes:

"We all know that the Declaration of Independence announced the United States' freedom from the British Empire. We all remember that it declared certain truths to be self-evident. But what you probably haven't heard is that the declaration also advanced an idea about war. The idea was that war ought to be governed by law. . . .

"The declaration was the beginning of a remarkable but now little-remembered American tradition in the laws of war. In the 1780s, a treaty with Prussia committed the United States to follow European rules of warfare.

"During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln published a code for the Union Army that serves to this day as the foundation for the law of war around the globe.

"In the 20th century, Americans took a lead role in establishing the modern law of war. Franklin Roosevelt directed the creation of the Nuremberg tribunal for high-ranking German war criminals, and his aides wrote the U.N. charter's rules for the use of force. In this century we can see traces of Jefferson's charges in the law of naval warfare, in the distinction between combatants and civilians, in international law restricting the use of mercenaries and in the Third Geneva Convention's rules on prisoners of war."

Unfortunately today, with Bush and Cheney in control, the United States has become a nation that flouts the laws of war that it had proposed and embraced in the past, as if 9/11 and acts of Islamic fanatics had somehow changed the way that a nation that purports to be "the home of the free" can throw its weight around with its war planes, tanks and armies, and all the while the rule of law when it comes to war be damned.

That feeling of anything goes pervades the setting up and continuation of Guantanamo, the treatment afforded Taliban prisoners in Afghanistan, the establishment of secret detention centers, the use of extraordinary renditions, water-boarding, the passing into law of Lindsay Graham's bill that denies habeas corpus relief to Islamic prisoners and at the same time revokes the tradition of the Great Writ passed down in English law since the 12th Century, the justification of interrogation methods bordering on torture, rationalized by John Yoo and other harsh acolytes of Dick Cheney's nether world.